Max time, week one: Reflections

Wow. Here I am at the end of my first full week of being THE teacher in the classroom ... and I'm still here! I was feeling on Friday that I had had "good" days and, perhaps "not as good as the others" days, but the paraprofessional assistant replied with the honest statement "Kindergarten is busy and there's a lot to do." I think she was trying to remind me that just because I feel more tired at the end of certain days doesn't necessarily mean they didn't go as well as other days. It just means I'm tired. Boy, am I ever.

All in all, I feel good about this past week. At the same time, I am aware of my goals for next week (or, you know, for my life in general). In one phrase: Stay the course.

... i.e. no wishy-washy conflict resolution. I've noticed I have a tendency to want to take a step back from conflict, as opposed to addressing it head-on, especially when the conflict is not mine. As a language learner and world traveler, one of my key learning techniques was to remain as in cognito as possible, drawing little attention to myself so that I could observe how interactions played out naturally. Now, as a Kindergarten teacher - that has to change. If I am still observing 100% of what is going on around me, I am, in turn, being observed - and checked! - by 110% of my students, who rely on me for the boundaries, advocacy, and mediation that they have not yet internalized for themselves. Sticking to my guns - as black and white as they must be at the five-year-old stage of human development - is imperative if my students are to one day regulate their behavior on their own. The moral structure (and resolve) I provide externally in the classroom is what will manifest itself and guide them internally as they continue to learn the nature and implications of their behavior.

... i.e. keep the momentum of the task at hand. Again, as a learner myself, I can become captivated by slightly unrelated material and, admittedly, distracted from what I originally set out to do. While this tact has actually introduced me to a wide range of - despite the initial distraction - very relevant learning opportunities for me, it does not serve the needs of five-year-olds, who are still distracted enough at their age by the overwhelming nature of the world they are discovering around them. For the sake of their own developing ability to focus on one task at a time, I must model extreme focus, thinking out loud and directing thoughts to a specific goal. Not to exclude, of course, the observations and comments students offer on their own part - right here is where I've not yet developed the finesse I have observed in my cooperating teacher of validating their comments while, simultaneously, moving forward in the direction of the lesson at hand. This, too, feels unnatural to me, because it feels overly structured and intentioned. However, as I mentioned above, young children seem to need and seek overly structured concepts in order to erect the initial frames of knowledge that they will continue to build onto as they learn and encounter more of life's intricacies and complexities.

Slightly tangential, but you are all a lot older than my five-year-olds, so I'm trusting you'll see the connection I'm going for:

Last spring, in the process of working on a graduate level independent project entitled Storytelling as Pedagogy, I came across the work of psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. In his book, The uses of enchantment, he makes the argument that the reason traditional fairy tales include such extreme characterizations of good and evil is that they separate the concepts of the two extremes in such a way that children recognize them first absolutely. Later in their development, as they experience the "gray" mix of good and evil in the real world, they come to conceive how good and evil co-exist in the world. However, children can only grasp the gray if they've known the black and white - they cannot discern the latter if they have only experienced the former.

And so, I am learning to return to my five-year-old sense of things:
"school is where we come to learn and do our work";
"we are all friends at school: the toys we play with belong to everyone"; and
right and wrong are, well, "that's okay" and "that's not okay".

As extreme as these statements may sound, I'm finding it a meaningful exercise for me to remind myself of these, and other, basic sentiments of living and learning in community. How easy it is to become overwhelmed by the grayness of life, to the point that it is easy to forget the black and white that create it. Kindergarten has proved to be quite the lesson in maintaining a sure internal compass in any situation - not for my sake, the individual, but for the sake of the community, living and learning together.

I think I can stay that course.

Kindergarten votes!

"My dad is voting for Barack Obama, and I'm voting for Barack Obama, too," said one of my students on Monday, very matter-of-factly. Because, after all, it is a free country. Why not let Kindergartners vote?

So we did ...

With either an "M" or an "O", my fifteen Kindergartners cast their ballots -- but not without proper introduction.

The day before we had read in small groups what we call our (Scholastic) Kindergarten magazine, which featured the voting process, complete with curtain and all. On Election Day, I brought our voting box to a big group circle to reemphasize a few things about the concept of voting:

Voting in our country is a great privilege and it's often why so many people love to live here. It means everyone gets to choose what they want for the country. Sometimes its for the president, like this year, but there are other important people to choose to make decisions for us. So, it's really important that we all vote and make our choice.

However, that choice that we make is also very private for some people. That's why there are big curtains at voting stations: so that no one will see what you choose, because it is your choice and yours alone. In the olden days, when voting was public, sometimes friends were very mean to each other because they made different choices, and said mean things like "I won't be your friend anymore", or they didn't invite them to birthday parties. Is that a nice friend thing to do? ("Noooo!") Of course not. So, people decided to keep their votes private so that everyone remembered: everyone makes their own choices. And now, it's your turn!

With that, I handed out papers and pencils, the students wrote down their letters, folded the paper, and turned them in. Then, I handed out blank white boards, markers and erasers, because it was already time to count the votes with our new shortcut: tally marks!

"One, two, three, four:

lay it across and close the door!"

Soon enough, the results were in:

I think my favorite part was the fact that - as far as I could tell - they all believed that their votes were really going to be included in the ones reported on the evening news. Who was I to contest?

Someday, they will.

"Max" time !!

I'm glad I decided to wait to write this post until the end of my first day of max time. For the next 2 1/2 weeks, I am the "teacher in charge", overseeing all activities all day long. Over the course of the past weekend, I think I traveled along the spectrum of every emotion possible in preparation for the peak of my student teaching experience. Let me think back ...


First it was like the bad dreams we have about going to school and finding out there's a test you had no idea you were going to have to take and so you haven't studied at all. I'm not sure why, but I was, at first, flooded with the feeling that I hadn't done as much of the background research I had wanted to do: reviewing my child development, extending my Responsive Classroom (R) reading, and other dorky eternal student desires. What followed was a rush of shame that I feel like I have been more worried about teaching "the right way" (as in, consistently with the style of my cooperating teacher) than about teaching genuinely within the development of my own style.

At some point, I got my act together, took out my unit plan, and started sketching out the day-to-day logistics of my first max week (Thank you, voice of my mother in the back of my head, reminding me "Take it one day at a time"). I scripted out some of the fire safety dialogue with Sparky the (puppet) fire dog for this morning's introduction to fire safety, which lightened my spirits. I wasn't, after all, going to get down on myself while practicing my puppet voices. My cooperating teacher and I went over my plans Sunday afternoon, and I remembered how much it helps me to talk through my thoughts and plans out loud. Not only did I feel more confident, I felt much more centered in what I had planned for today.

Sunday evening, sure, I'll admit it: I got the butterflies: "This is it!" I thought to myself, "Ready or not, here they come: the most honest, ruthless, and caring teachers there are in the world."

Following the emotional trip of the past 48 hours, I took it as a good sign those butterflies in my stomach were happy butterflies as I drifted off to sleep, ready to teach ... and ready to keep learning.

StoryWalk: An "active" approach to literacy

Fall is coming, fall is coming ... so goes the song we have been singing. But now, without a doubt, fall is here! We've had an unusually long and spectacular foliage season, with plenty of sunshine and the pleasant crisp air that rejuvenates you with every breath.

What better way to celebrate fall than by reading this lovely tale, Leaves, by David Ezra Stein. A young bear, in his first year of life, becomes distressed at the falling leaves of autumn. He tries to attach them back on, but to no avail. So he settles down for his winter hibernation ... only to find the green leaves welcoming him when he awakes in the spring! A lovely little tale ...

While at a literary festival in Burlington in September, I learned about an exciting recently developed project called StoryWalk (TM), which constructed and now loans out picture books as a set of stakes with backed and laminated pages. Whoever loans the book sets the stakes up along a trail of their choice - for example, the town of Bristol recently set them up along the path from the elementary school to the public library. StoryWalk (TM) was created by Anne Ferguson in partnership with the Kellogg-Hubbard Library of Montpelier, VT, and the VT Bicycle and Pedestrian Coalition, and has been supported by a variety of other organizations.

Well, when I saw the example Anne had set up at the festival, I knew I wanted to try to loan a book for our school. Sure enough, Leaves was available for the last week of October, and I was fully supported by my cooperating teacher, the school nurse, and the principal. Several colleagues expressed an interest in the project, too, and one third-grade teacher volunteered to pick it up for us in Montpelier.

We received the book in five bundles of stakes, along with a starter stake, so as not to damage the stakes when putting them in the ground. I set them up on a trail that wrapped behind the school and circled the sports fields before returning to the front of the school again.


Our school sits right next to a wooded area with trails to a local neighborhood, so the setting was just perfect for Leaves. We took our Kindergarteners out the very first day, despite the threat of rain. I learned quickly that five-year-olds need to practice making a half-circle around Exhibit A in a way in which everyone can see. My cooperating teacher helped facilitate this practice: First, we situated them where they should be. After we read a page, we walked together to the next page, nobody getting ahead of me, until I called "Freeze!" I walked up to the page, then invited them to make a half-circle, guiding and helping as necessary. When they seemed to get it, we said, "Now, let's see if you can make a half-circle on your own at the next page..." Off they went! ... And they did just fine. "You need to give them explicit instruction at the beginning, practice a few times, but then you need to give them the freedom," said my cooperating teacher. Lesson learned!


All in all, it was a great alternative to our typical Storytime. The children especially enjoyed the character of the bear. Because he is "in his first year" ("What does that mean?" - "He's just a baby!"), they were greatly entertained by the bear's misunderstanding of the fallen leaves, much the way we adults are entertained by the comments children make. I could see them take a certain pride in knowing something the bear didn't, if they didn't just find it funny. Either way, I could see how the character was particularly developmentally appropriate for Kindergarteners: his ignorance boosted their sense of their own knowledge; his genuine concern endeared him to them; and the nonsensical questions he asked ("Are you okay?" he asked the leaf.) especially appealed to their sense of humor.

That afternoon, the story provided an especially nice drawing opportunity for our journal writing. It also gave me the chance to recall the storyline with them in small groups, show what the real book looked like, and learn from them what part or image of the story they remembered or liked the best. This was an especially nice opportunity just to talk with them, for the sake of my own learning about them: their perceptions, their ideas, and what they relate to most. This is the great gift of teaching that people forget to tell you about. These close encounters come in such personal little doses, like the last little box under the Christmas tree, that they are easy to miss. But they are essential to the healthy life of a teacher, like the very air we breathe, but also tend to forget in our daily thanksgivings.

Oliver's vegetables: a taste test!

This is a little lesson I absolutely wanted to document. It took me, admittedly, a bit by surprise, but I think the most memorable learning experiences do...

In this short story by Vivian French, Oliver is a little boy who only likes French fries. On a visit to his grandparents' home, Oliver's grandfather invites him to find the potatoes in his vast vegetable garden so that they can make French fries together. Because he has no idea what potatoes look like in a garden, Oliver proceeds to dig up everything but the potatoes, and actually learns to like eating spinach, cabbage, carrots, beets, peas, and rhubarb as well.

Living with the lovely folks I do, who just happen to have a modest garden of their own, I couldn't resist returning to the story to connect the illustrations and content to real examples of vegetables commonly grown here in Vermont. So I made up some placards with photos of the vegetables in the ground, brought in what I could find out back, and recalled with my students all of the vegetables Oliver found, giving ample time to observe and comment on "the real stuff".

I was impressed how much my kids knew about root vegetables, such as carrots and beets, and the enthusiasm with which they declared one or the other vegetable at hand as "My favorite!". I was particularly curious what would result from a small-group taste test during that afternoon's rotation stations.

Cabbage

☺ I liked it! ___
☹ No, thank you. ___

We tested four vegetables: beets (seen above), carrots, spinach, and cabbage. I had a cutting board with me at the table, where I cut bite-size pieces of each vegetables in front of the students after recalling some of the familiar characteristics of each. I also tried to add a little tid-bit about each they might find interesting, like the fact that if you eat too many carrots, the excess beta karotene in your body will turn your skin orange!

If the students liked what they tasted, they put a check mark next to the smiley face and comment "I liked it!". If they did not care for a vegetable, they put a check mark next to the frowny face and practiced saying "No, thank you." We talked informally about which was their favorite, the different ways we might prepare them, etc.

To my pleasant surprise, I had both extremes and everything in between. One student wanted me to write down all the vegetables we tried for his mother, so he could ask her to make them at home. Another very dutifully touched each vegetable to his tongue and put it right back on the table with a simple "No, thank you." Some experienced some pleasant surprises themselves, especially with the sweetness of the beets. Others were fairly confident in their knowledge of vegetables, including which ones they liked and disliked.

The following day, I returned once again to the topic of vegetables, and laid out a large plastic mat with a grid on it (a math material my cooperating teacher had purchased for the classroom). I laid out the four placards for the four vegetables we tasted at the top of each row and handed out our class name cards to the students. One by one, I invited them up to place their name card in the column beneath their favorite vegetable. There was great anticipation for the final results:

Spinach started out strong until ...

the beets caught up to it ...

... but both were finally trumped by ...

CARROTS

I was not necessarily surprised at the outcome, but was delighted by the students' excitement over the whole thing.

Chart-making is actually an extremely valuable activity in Kindergarten, because it aids their comprehension of several different concepts. When we had finished I started with a standard question that I have learned from many teaching mentors and role models:

What do you notice?

If there was only one question teachers were allowed to ask, this one would get my vote! Children are full of observations and are even more full of the desire to share them. What emerge from their observations are comments that relate to the following:

Counting:
"Seven kids liked carrots. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7."
"Four kids liked beets. I can tell: two on the top, two on the bottom."

Spatial awareness:
"There are more kids that liked carrots than kids that liked any other vegetables."
"The same number of kids liked beets and spinach."

Reasoning with counting and spatial awareness:
"If we took three away from the carrots column, then it would have the same as the spinach and the beets."

My cooperating teacher chimed in with the concluding question to wrap it all up: "Why do you think we make charts like this? If I were to buy vegetables for the class, how would this chart help me?" ... thus driving home the relevance of such activities.

There is so much to do with a book like this, content matter like this, and supplemental activities such as the favorite vegetable chart. I think my favorite part of the whole sequence was that it all started with a story. Previously, I had explored storytelling as pedagogy in my graduate studies. I found strong parallels as I thought about story-based curriculum, such as this little sequence based on Oliver's Vegetables. It appears to appeal and work well at the Kindergarten level, but I don't know anyone who doesn't learn something from a story. The original purpose of telling stories was to pass on the knowledge required to survive as a human species and culture; today, they provide equally meaningful learning opportunities with extensions that only teachers may lay out for their particular students to explore.

P.S. Of course, at the end of the week, we celebrated at afternoon snack time with ... what else? ... home-sliced and classroom-sauteed:

True confessions ... (Dora, part 3)

I realize I haven't returned to the subject of my struggles with Dora in quite a while, and I think it is time. A lot has developed, as you might imagine.

First, thanks to those who commented. As was intuited, the information I've gathered from others who know her family has indicated that positive social behavior is not exactly modeled for her at home. I'll leave it at that. There was another comment about engaging in play with Dora as a means to foster a positive relationship with her, which rings true with a sentiment I have shared with my cooperating teacher and paraprofessional assistant: despite - or perhaps, because - of her misbehavior, it's as if we need to go overboard on praising the things she does well.

This is hard for me, because I don't like to praise so much as share my students' excitement, but my cooperating teacher pointed out that we're essentially making up for five years of not having much positive feedback or pride taken in what she does. Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of praise, children look to the adults around them to validate what they are doing and what they accomplish. It is part of their development as autonomous individuals - the consistent parameters for behavior that we set externally become the parameters they later internalize as their conscience. We have all noticed Dora look right at us before she is about to do something she knows she shouldn't, as if to ask for the "No" that she is not yet able to say to herself.

Likewise, she will, supposedly, learn positive behaviors based on our over-approval of her basic accomplishments, e.g. the letters she knows, laying still at Quiet Time, or playing with her friends nicely. What results is a lot of externalized thinking - that is, thinking out loud (my forte, if I must say so myself) - with her together: "Pretty soon, we're going to sit down together at the rug to learn together as a whole class. Let's see, what should we do to make sure we are good learners at the rug?" OR "If kids say or do mean things to their friends at recess, they don't get to have recess with their friends. They'll have to play by themselves, and that's pretty boring. If we want to be able to play with our friends, what are some ways we could play with them?"

What I have come to focus on the most, though, as far as my relationship with Dora goes, is the establishment of a few daily routines that serve the purpose of giving her the chance to succeed, therefore giving me the chance to reinforce with a positive response, but also of reminding us both that "we come to school to learn and play with our friends" and that are things we can do to show that we are "good learners" and "good friends". We've "practiced" good learning a number of times, usually at recess, which is my cooperating teacher's standard punishment, because it usually nips the problem right in the bud, understandably. Dora is another case, though, and I think it's important to set a positive tone: "Ok, Dora, we're at school now, let's practice being a good learner so we remember what to do later..."

For example, today we practiced sitting at the rug and going to a chair at the table if it looked like "you weren't ready to learn". Another day, I might just take the suggestion of a comment made on my last entry about Dora and color with her, reminding her by thinking out loud how great it is to color next to a friend, but still feel like my picture is mine because she's not drawing on it or drawing on me or saying anything mean about my picture.

The only hesitation I have with practicing being a good friend with her (as opposed to being a good learner), is that I am not her friend, I am her teacher. Even if she were my daughter, I would not treat her like a friend, because the nature of the relationship between someone her age and someone my age is not going to entail at all the characteristics of a healthy friendship. So I have to be careful: I have to show, as my cooperating teacher says, that "I am in charge"; at the same time, I will not be "in charge" until she actually respects what I say, which is a result of building a good rapport with her. Still working on that one.

I greatly appreciate the support of my cooperating teacher, the paraprofessional assistant, and the other Kindergarten teachers as I prepare for my "max time" starting in November. When I am leading whole group instruction, the paraprofessional will be assisting as usual and will know exactly what needs to happen if Dora "is not ready to learn" or even "is not going to be able to learn with the rest of the class". When I am by myself, such as Storytime, I will have a red ticket that another student will take to the neighboring classroom to give to the teacher, who will come right in and take Dora to their class to sit by herself.

This is the plan thus far, and I have one more week to make sure I'm comfortable using it. I'm not there yet, but I'm learning more and more to trust the jist of it: negative punishment, not negative attention, as in "It is not fun if I don't get to learn and be with my friends. I want to be able to do both, so I know I have to [fill in the blank] in order to do so."

I hope to be able to go back - in my mind, and in discussion with professors - to the theory more, just to reexamine for myself that the jist of what I am doing is the jist I am striving for above. Any comments along the way are greatly appreciated, and feel free to respond to each other! Social curriculum may first become curriculum in Kindergarten, but its lessons follow us well into adulthood ...

Osgood-Slaughter of the mind: Attaining the fluency of teaching

Oh, dear.

I am, of late, reminded of the phase of language-learning, in which you understand everything that is going on around you and everything that other people are talking about, but cannot for the life of you express what you want to say about it all. You have the knowledge you need, but it remains passive for the time being.

Slowly - and yes, painfully - that knowledge activates itself as you gain confidence and and your ability to automate gains momentum. Then, it is just a matter of time and exponentials until you find, magically, you are fluent. You really do know what you knew you knew all along. Your brain needed time in its expansion to catch up to the input it was receiving, as if Osgood-Slaughter disease had taken over your mind.

And so, I continue to strive toward this ideal as my responsibilities in the classroom increase. I am well over the half-way hump, which means that what I am doing well is not as noticeable and crucial, perhaps, as what I'm not doing well. In other words, once the glass is more than half full, it's simply not full. What is lacking is supposed to be there.

Case in point, brutally put: I bombed the preparation of math stations last week. If I was getting grades for what I do in the classroom everyday, I would have given myself a big fat F for the fact that I had not thought ahead and prepped ahead to send my students to the math stations they love to rotate through on their own on Friday afternoons. I didn't even need to hear what my cooperating teacher had to say about it, the consequences were as obvious as whiplash.

More than anything, learning time was lost. Students waited for me to flounder finding the cards that would tell them what stations they would be visiting, as well as the materials they would need at several of the stations. The students put their name cards in the slots next to the station they wanted to begin at. There are only 4 slots so that each station does not get too crowded; students are expected to rotate through all the stations at their own pace by continually returning to the cards and putting their name cards in the different corresponding slots. In addition - and almost more regretful - in my hurry to find the cards, I put up an incorrect card that confused and upset the students because the choice they had made for themselves and were excited about was now denied. This has particularly dangerous potential for five-year-olds, because their very development relies on the practice of making choices, being accountable for those choices, and growing in their autonomy as decision-makers.

Did they really notice? Probably not. I dashed around to make amends in appropriate corners, and the students had a great time - they always do. But I noticed. I noticed not the cause, but the effect, and believe me, that was all I needed. Thinking through it in hindsight, I can't really explain the cause, which baffles me, but bothers me more than anything. It reminded me of a common adult refrain I heard throughout my high school years: "There's no excuse for not getting an A. You do the work, and you do it well."

I know what good teaching is. I see it and hear it and recognize it all around me in the amazing colleagues I'm working with. But, it seems, as I've tried to activate into practice what I know and observe, it becomes painfully clear that I have yet to achieve the fluency of teaching.

I know I am capable of that fluency. I did not take from this episode the feeling that I can't do what is expected and necessary of a classroom teacher. But it was what I'll call a healthy blow to the ego - the blow that puts you in your place, because you put yourself there. Learning by doing, folks: step right up.